Day Seven

Look at that! We’re now a whole week into Na/GloPoWriMo.

Our featured participant for the day is The Great Unknown, where the line-breaking poem for Day 6 starts off in breathless prose before breaking into a series of sharp, descending lines.

Today we have a new interview, this time with Kyle Dargan, whose fifth book of poetry, Anagnorisis, is being published later this year by Triquarterly/Northwestern University Press. The title of the book, a Greek word that refers to “a startling discovery that produces a change from ignorance to knowledge,” is a good lens through which to view Dargan’s poems, which braid extended metaphors and historical and current world events together to make metaphysical and moral claims in verse. You can read some of Dargan’s recent poems here and here, and our interview with him here.

And now for our (optional) prompt. In our interview, Kyle Dargan suggests writing out a list of all of your different layers of identity. For example, you might be a wife, a grandmother, a Philadelphian, a dental assistant, a rabid Phillies fan, a seamstress, retiree, agnostic, cancer survivor, etc.. These are all ways you could be described or lenses you could be viewed through. Now divide all of those things into lists of what makes you feel powerful and what makes you feel vulnerable. Now write a poem in which one of the identities from the first list contends or talks with an identity from the second list. This might turn out to be kind of a “heavy” exercise, emotionally, but I hope you will find the results enlightening.

Happy writing!